Part 8 Superpower #2
They looked around quizzically for the courtesy van, expecting it to do the morning yoga run.
But it wasn’t there.
In fact, it never returned.
I thought about this.
I wondered if that was when Aristo King had been taken.
If the kidnapper(s) had impersonated the superintendent, Lenny Grossman, maybe they’d also impersonated the courtesy van’s female driver.
Which would make three bad guys: the super, the female driver and Sauna Guy.
Of course, later on December 21st—around 6:50 a.m., shortly after Ms Kimura had raised the alarm—the whole garage became a circus as it filled with NYPD and FBI cars, cops and agents. (That, I noted, would have been 5:50 a.m. in Houston; they would call me nineteen minutes later, at 6:09 a.m.)
Later again that day, around 3 p.m. New York time, nearly all those same cars sped out—I even saw Hooper, Longmuir and the Tech Detect all zooming out in their cars, heading for the ruse at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
I rubbed my eyes.
Checked my watch. It was 2 p.m.
I’d been staring at my screen for six hours straight and was starting to lose my concentra—
A hand fell on my shoulder and I jumped, startled.
‘Whoa, little man. Take it easy, cowboy.’ It was Heidi. She offered me a sandwich. ‘I got some updates for you, so I figured I’d come by and tell you in person.’
‘Great,’ I said.
Suddenly, my phone rang.
It was Georgy. We spoke briefly before I said, ‘Excellent,’ and hung up.
‘What’s going on?’ Heidi asked.
‘Georgy’s finally got us access to see the Grandmaster’s body,’ I said. ‘Let’s go take a look before Audrey is woken up.’
Offices of the Westchester County Medical Examiner
28 December, 1445 hours
Forty-five minutes later, I entered the offices of the Westchester County Medical Examiner with Heidi, Georgy and Georgy’s newest client, Mrs Olga Kazan, the widow of Sergei Kazan, a.k.a. the Grandmaster.
(After my visit to Roman Oberov’s apartment, Oberov had ordered Olga Kazan to make Georgy her lawyer and she had promptly done so.)
Since Sleepy Hollow is in Westchester County, all the bodies of people killed in the district by ‘unlawful acts, violence or unexplained circumstances’ are sent to the morgue at the county’s medical examiner’s facility.
The morgue was only a short drive from Phelps Hospital.
Indeed, the cemetery where Sergei Kazan had been shot by Merritt Garrett actually lay in between the morgue and the hospital.
Now, even if someone is a criminal, their wife gets to see their body and, if all forensic examinations have been completed, to take it away for burial.
Getting to see the Grandmaster’s body had been more complicated than usual, since he’d been implicated in the deaths of several cops and FBI agents at the tower and been killed in a shootout with a private detective.
But the coroner had had the corpse for a week, and as Georgy had argued—when he spoke about legal matters, the skinny dude was actually quite polished and confident—that was enough. Honestly, Georgy reasoned, how much more could his body tell them now?
(Roman Oberov had also got the families of the two Russian goons killed with the Grandmaster to make Georgy their attorney, so we could arrange for the release of their corpses at the same time.)
We stood in a chilly freezer room looking at the body of Sergei Kazan lying on a roll-out steel tray.
‘Oh, Sergei, Sergei . . .’ Olga Kazan fell to her knees, weeping at the sight of her dead husband.
Kazan had been a thin man, bony and gawky, with black hair that receded in a widow’s peak. His fingers were long.
Two gunshot wounds were visible on his left chest.
Garrett had shot him right in the heart.
While the Grandmaster’s body may not have been able to tell the authorities anything more than they already knew, it might tell me something.
‘Have you got the autopsy report?’ I asked the technician accompanying us.
‘I can’t let you take that—’ he began.
‘But we are entitled to read it,’ Georgy said in his best lawyer’s voice.
The technician handed over a file tucked into a pigeonhole beside the steel tray.
I scanned the report with Heidi looking over my shoulder.
‘What are you looking for?’ Heidi asked.
‘Two specific things,’ I said. ‘In the bloodwork. Them.’
I pointed at two lines in the report:
GC-MS, LC-MS/MS: Morphine sulfate 66 ng/mL
LC-MS/MS (Blood plasma): Naloxone <1 mg
These were the gas chromatography–mass spectrometry and the liquid chromatography tandem–mass spectrometry labs.
(The coroner here in Sleepy Hollow was very good.
Naloxone is absorbed into the bloodstream rapidly. If the coroner hadn’t done these tests quite soon after the shootout, the naloxone probably wouldn’t have been detectable. Even working this promptly, the coroner had only found trace quantities of it in Sergei Kazan’s blood.)
‘Morphine sulfate and traces of naloxone,’ I said aloud.
‘What does that mean?’ Heidi asked.
‘The anaesthetic drug Duramorph is morphine sulfate. It was used to knock out all the victim-hostages at 59West. They were also woken up with doses of naloxone. Looks like the Grandmaster was also knocked out and woken up with the same pair of drugs.’
I checked the autopsy reports of the two Russian goons who had also been killed in the shootout with Merritt Garrett.
Same thing.
Morphine sulfate and naloxone in their blood.
They’d also been drugged and woken up.
Georgy, Heidi and I left Mrs Kazan to handle the transportation of the bodies as we returned to Georgy’s little car in the parking lot.
‘So, Roman Oberov was right?’ Georgy said. ‘The Grandmaster was set up?’
‘It certainly seems so,’ I said.
‘This is all too weird,’ Heidi said.
She was right.
December 21st had been a weird, wild and nonstop day.
If what Oberov suspected was true—and it seemed true—this only made it weirder.
For it meant that someone had drugged the Grandmaster and the two thugs, brought them comatose to the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, placed guns in their hands, and woken them up with naloxone just before we arrived in the FBI helicopter. And then they’d been shot when we encountered them.
‘Yeah, it is . . .’ I said slowly. ‘Let’s go. I want to check something out. It’s not far from here.’
‘Where are we going?’ Georgy said.
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
28 December, 1615 hours
Snow was falling when we arrived at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
We went directly to the open shallow grave that seven days earlier had held the richest man in the world, Aristo King.
The grave still had a ring of crime-scene tape around it.
It was just after 4 p.m. and dusk was already falling.
The cemetery was silent, all sound dampened by the snow.
No wonder Washington Irving had set his famous short story here. It was a creepy place even without a headless horseman prancing about.
I gazed out over the cemetery.
‘What are you thinking, little man?’ Heidi asked.
I scanned the old graves and mausoleums until my eyes fell on the tree line to the northeast.
‘If we accept the proposition that the Grandmaster and the two Russian thugs were drugged—and then re-awoken with naloxone just before our arrival in the chopper—then we have to work backwards: whoever drugged them must’ve kept them nearby.
I mean, it’s not easy to drag sedated dudes a long way.
Whoever did it would’ve been keeping them somewhere close. ’
I strode over to the tree line with Heidi.
Georgy hurried after us.
I stepped into the tree line and through a small cluster of pines until suddenly I came to a stream with an old structure built alongside it.
It was a water mill.
Dilapidated. Covered in moss. Walls overgrown with weeds. A ruin.
And a perfect location to keep some unconscious men.
We walked over to it.
As I grabbed the handle of its warped wooden door, Heidi drew a short-barrelled Glock 43 pistol from the back of her waistband and held it poised.
‘Where did you get a gun? We can’t conceal-carry in New York,’ I said.
‘Not all of us follow the rules like you do, little man,’ Heidi said. ‘I borrowed it from my friend for a little reassurance.’
I regripped the door.
It opened with a rusty squeal.
At another location half a mile to the north—unseen by me, unknown to me—an alarm was triggered by my opening of the door.
Someone turned at the alarm and frowned.
I entered the mill with Heidi. Georgy lingered at the door.
The mill’s earthen floor was littered with the usual trash one finds in isolated places: the detritus of teenagers.
Beer bottles, soda cans, empty chip packets and, of course, cigarette butts and marijuana joints.
As Georgy waited just inside the doorway—anxiously keeping watch for headless horsemen—for the next few minutes, Heidi and I examined the floor, playing our iPhones’ flashlights over it in a grid format, searching.
And I saw it.
A glint of light in the dirt.
A reflection off something.
Something silver.
‘Heidi, over here,’ I said.
We hurried to the source of the glint and crouched over it.
It was a piece of peeled-back silver foil, half-buried in the dirt.
I picked it up, turned it over in my fingers.
Printed on it were the words:
NARCAN (naloxone HCl)
NASAL SPRAY 4 mg
‘Narcan,’ Heidi said.
‘The commercial name for naloxone,’ I said. ‘Okay. This is progress.’
And it was.
It confirmed that the Grandmaster and his two goons had been kept here . . . drugged with Duramorph . . . and then awoken with Narcan.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Georgy seemed relieved at that and practically bolted out.
Heidi and I emerged from the old mill to see Georgy hurrying into the cluster of pines that led back to the cemetery. Still gripping her little pistol, Heidi strode off after him and disappeared among the trees.
I stopped as I came to the line of pines and turned, scanning the area around the ruined mill one last time—
—and I started in shock.
A dark figure stood on the other side of the stream.
A man.
Standing dead still behind a waist-high snow mound.
He stood so utterly still that at first I thought he was a statue.
But he was no statue.